Gadi Eliashiv, Author at Singular

Singular announces first-to-market SKAdNetwork support to replace the IDFA

No IDFA? No problem. Continue to drive growth with Singular’s best-in-market SKAdNetwork solution. Click here to learn more!

For the past couple of years we’ve been preparing for the eventuality that Apple would deprecate the IDFA. What was once an unfathomable scenario will now become a reality this September when iOS 14 launches publicly.

While the IDFA isn’t completely gone, Apple created an opt-in mechanism that will effectively render it useless, and as a result, thousands of companies and millions of developers are scratching their heads and wondering what’s next.

We’ve given it a lot of thought here at Singular, as this fundamentally redefines the role of Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs).

MMPs are designed to provide unbiased third-party measurement of your mobile marketing efforts. Up to now, much of that promise was facilitated with the aid of mobile ad identifiers like Apple’s IDFA on iOS and GAID (Google’s Advertising ID) for Android. Moving forward, we face a significant challenge: finding new ways to keep that promise and help marketers optimize their campaigns … while preserving end-user privacy. Even in the middle of massive market shifts like the one we’re going through now.

That is why I’m very excited to announce Singular’s first-to-market support for SKAdNetwork, making it scalable, simple, and seamless for mobile marketers.

Yesterday’s announcement at WWDC is a tectonic shift for mobile marketers. Some are probably wondering how they can optimize ad campaigns in the future. It will still be possible, and you will be able to understand which marketing inputs are driving the results you need.

Context: what is SKAdNetwork?

SKAdNetwork is a library provided as part of iOS to help marketers attribute marketing in a privacy-safe way.

Apple’s been working on it for some time. Thankfully, we’ve also been working on how to support it for over a year now. But in iOS 14, Apple has given SKAdNetwork some major renovations that made it a whole lot more useful and usable. And it definitely feels like Apple listened to us and other marketers in the Mobile Attribution Privacy Coalition who spent time analyzing its strengths and weaknesses.

The key concept in SKAdNetwork is that the iOS operating system will now play a central role in facilitating marketing attribution.

If SKAdNetwork is enabled in an app, the App Store will now receive attribution parameters when it’s opened due to a click on an ad. Then, if this click results in a conversion — an app download — iOS itself will send a postback accompanied by those attribution parameters.

(And, potentially, some important post-install conversion data, which we’ll cover later.)

This may sound somewhat similar to Google’s Play Referral mechanism, but what makes SKAdNetwork privacy-preserving is the fact that the attribution parameters cannot contain any device IDs or personally-identifying information. In addition, the install postback is sent by the operating system itself, and not by the installed app. As such advertisers will know that an install has happened, but they won’t be able to connect a specific install with a specific device, thus preserving privacy.

SKAdNetwork 1.0 was initially released over two years ago, and it offered very limited granularity plus no support for post-install measurements, making it practically unusable for optimization purposes.

The good news is that in SKAdNetwork 2.0, Apple added “publisher-app” granularity. In other words, marketers can now get data on which publisher drove which install. That’s critical: now we can provide publisher-level insights to marketers. In addition, Apple also added limited support for post-install tracking with their new updateConversionValue and registerAppForAdNetworkAttribution methods.

A high level flow looks like this:

SKAdNetwork 2.0 attribution flow using the updateConversionValue or registerAppForAdNetworkAttribution methods

What does this mean for marketers?

Currently, marketers have two main sources of data for measuring marketing campaigns:

From MMPs: metrics on installs and post-install cohorted metrics
From ad networks: metrics on impressions, clicks, video-views, spend

As things currently stand, Singular combines those two datasets together. Then marketers can get both granular and high-level insights on the results of their marketing investments. With those insights, they can optimize acquisition and retargeting campaigns, test new networks, and more.

With iOS 14, everything changes.

For starters, the data flow for mobile app attributions will change. Instead of apps sending postbacks to Singular, now Apple will be sending install postbacks to ad networks whose ads caused the app install. These postbacks include information about the install that is cryptographically signed by Apple, and can be verified using Apple’s public key.

Another key issue with iOS 14: measuring post-install activity. SKAdNetwork includes functionality for an app to send a small amount of post-install conversion data back to the ad networks, but this is limited in both scope and timing. (More details on this shortly in our next post.)

There’s a significant positive here, by the way. In iOS 14, Apple vouches for app installs, which dramatically reduces the likelihood of ad fraud.

All of this means major change for marketers. Whereas previously MMPs collected all the data they needed, now iOS advertisers will need to collect all install postbacks (and any post-install conversion data) from every ad network they run campaigns with. Plus, advertisers will need to validate these postbacks, store them, translate the attribution parameters to human readable data, and then connect it to campaign spend data to determine return on ad spend. Oh, and the closer you can do it real-time, the better you can be at optimizing your future ad spend.

That’s exactly where Singular comes in.

Singular’s solution: making SKAdNetwork simple and scalable

Singular is the leader in aggregating data from thousands of data sources. We collect more data from more sources in more ways than anyone else, which we then standardize, aggregate, and present. And that’s perfectly aligned with our MMP attribution product, which has gained incredible momentum in the last two years with many of the world’s best brands switching from legacy MMPs to Singular as a unified aggregation and attribution solution.

Our primary advantage as a platform becomes even stronger in this new SKAdNetwork reality.

We already are by far the best in the world in gathering full data sets from every single channel. After all, that’s our core strength. In supporting SKAdNetwork, we will be adding the role of collecting the various Apple-generated postbacks from all of your ad network partners. We’ll then verify them, de-dupe them, parse them, and connect them to your ad spend to report on ROI.

And Singular will still help you achieve publisher-level granularity for marketing reporting (what some in the industry have called sub-publisher granularity).

Plus, of course, the SKAdNetwork stack will have to work side by side with the existing MMP capabilities of the Singular stack, including continued support for:

iOS fingerprinting (adhering to any Apple updates)
iOS deeplink support (still fully supported)
iOS deferred deeplink support (reliant on fingerprinting)
Android attribution (yeah, apparently Android is kind of a big deal)
Web and cross-device attribution (growing in importance)
Spend and ROAS reporting (critical for marketing optimization)

SKAdNetwork is going to introduce new challenges and complexities. There’s no doubt about that. However, we commit to helping you navigate these challenges.

And we will ensure you have the ability to do your job … while preserving user privacy.

Interested in continuing the conversation? Join us and other industry experts in the Mobile Attribution Privacy (MAP) Coalition Slack group, to exchange ideas and ask questions.

iOS 14: IDFA is not dead yet, but it’s definitely on life support

No IDFA? No problem. Continue to drive growth with Singular’s best-in-market SKAdNetwork solution. Click here to learn more!

Today at WWDC 2020, Apple announced several new privacy enhancements in iOS14 that will debut in September. We’ve been long anticipating these changes, and have been working to prepare for this since our announcement a year ago on the formation of the Mobile Attribution Privacy group. (See more details here, and join the Slack group here).

The good news for consumers: more privacy.

The good news for marketers: it’s not game over for data-driven marketing.

Some of the changes to Apple’s SKAdNetwork framework are extremely promising. Apple’s SKAdNetwork improvements suggest that not only are they listening to what app publishers need, but that we will still be able to provide tools for sophisticated marketers.

In addition, Singular has a number of upcoming privacy-preserving solutions that we will announce shortly.

Opt-In for IDFA

Starting with iOS 14, apps will need to receive permission from users in order to use the Identifier for Advertisers, the IDFA. To be clear, this is explicitly granting permission to track users across apps and services.

Straight from the documentation:
“Your app needs to request permission to track sometime before tracking occurs. This could be at first launch or when certain app features are used. For example, when signing on with a third-party SSO.”

Looking at the documentation for iOS 14, we can confirm that when the “Ask App Not To Track” button is clicked, the app will not be able to access the device’s IDFA, and receive the same value as if the Limit Ad Tracking mechanism is turned on. In short, until a user grants authorization, all identifiers will be zeroed out.

One piece of good news if you want to use the IDFA and believe it’s something that your users will want?

The message will be customizable. “App developers need to provide custom text, known as a usage description string, which is displayed as a system-permission alert request,” Apple’s documentation says.

That means you’ll be able to make the case to your users that opting in is a good thing for them.

Let’s be frank, however.

The vast majority of people who see a message like the above are not going to opt in. When they see that a publisher wants permission to track them across apps and websites owned by other companies … forget about it.

So you’re going to have to be ready to live without IDFAs.

Checking for IDFA status

Apple is deprecating the isAdvertisingTrackingEnabled function. In order to check if a user has actually enabled measurement, developers will need to check the AppTrackingTransparency framework.

Changes to SKAdNetwork

Apple has also made multiple changes to SKAdNetwork, the class that validates advertiser-driven app installations. We’re going to go in-depth on this in a follow-up blog post tomorrow — and a webinar — but here’s the quick overview:

Apple added timers, which likely means that the conversion notification won’t be immediate. This is probably a privacy-enhancing move.
Apple added a mechanism to update a conversion value. This may be an initial method to attach limited post-install KPIs to the conversion notification, which of course is crucial for optimizations.
Apple added Redownload/Reinstall support, which is always nice to know.
Apple added Source App ID to recognize the publishing app (this is huge because we can now facilitate publisher-level granularity).

There are quite a few more changes, but we’ll continue researching them and update on those later in our in-depth follow-up post.

Finally: new App Privacy section

Later this year, your app’s App Store product pages will start to feature summaries of your self-reported privacy practices, plus a link to your privacy policy. That includes both data gather via the app that is used to track users elsewhere plus data that publishers might access outside the app and link to users’ profiles in the app. Example: purchases, web browsing history, location data, and other demographic information.

Singular releases free tools & training for marketers impacted by coronavirus

Starting today, Singular is giving our unified marketing data and analytics platform to all SMB marketers for free, with no commitments, for half a year—180 days. In addition, we’ll provide advanced training from industry experts on marketers’ toughest growth and data management challenges.

Marketers at the fastest-growing companies have access to technology and training that others don’t. Singular wants to address the training gap, as well as the technology. To this end, we’re offering best-in-class webinars and workshops on key topics that show marketers how to harness their data to address performance and consumer behavior shifts, and provide ways to leverage this data effectively across organizations.

You can access our free tools and training from our coronavirus resources page:

The hurdles that SMBs must overcome

We’re giving access to our Starter tools for free to alleviate the issues that small and medium-sized businesses are encountering during the coronavirus pandemic. Singular unifies data across all of a marketer’s ad networks and channels, enabling them to assess the performance of their campaigns and make better, faster decisions to grow their business.

Now more than ever, marketers need to prove ROI. They need to be able to shift strategies rapidly to adapt to changing consumer behavior and make smart advertising decisions. Others are growing fast in our shelter-in-place reality and need the tools to scale campaigns efficiently. And almost all of us are now working remotely and need to stay in alignment with our colleagues with a single source of truth for Marketing, BI, Finance, Creative, and Executive teams.

In short, it’s a really tough time for SMB marketers right now. Not only are they under a lot of scrutiny—they’re having to justify their work and protect their very existence.

By offering our unified marketing data and analytics platform for free for half a year, we hope that marketers hardest hit by COVID-19 will have the help they need to ride out and overcome the worst effects of the current downturn. They’ll gain a single source of truth for marketing performance; automated, aggregated access to all of their marketing data; and a platform that aligns all of their teams on the same tailored business metrics.

Other things advertisers can do during this difficult time

Outside of our offer, there are several strategic things SMB advertisers can do today to keep their business stable—if not growing—during this time:

Report on ROI daily to demonstrate the value of your work, cut ineffective ad spend, and only invest in what’s working for your business
Make sure you have near real-time reporting for key KPIs to quickly react to shifts in performance or consumer behavior
Analyze your users’ lifetime value and how COVID-19 has impacted it
Plan around negative (drop in ARPU) and positive (drop in CAC) scenarios

A few more things to keep in mind….

Beware of fraudsters

In addition, now’s a good time to double down on fraud prevention. With so many “bad actors” coming out of the woodwork during this pandemic, take extra precautions to protect your data, reporting, and apps.

Look at cross-device performance

Make sure you’re getting the full picture when it comes to your advertising efforts. That means being able to connect marketing spend data to conversions across devices and platforms. Now more than ever, the effectiveness of every ad dollar is only as good as the accuracy of your ROI analysis.

Learn more about how Singular can help

If you’re interested in learning more, Singular has industry-leading solutions that can help with both fraud prevention as well as cross-device attribution.

The learning curve: continued marketing education

We’ve seen so many great sources of information (and inspiration) pop up online over the last few months: cooking classes, workout routines, music festivals, and more. People are also starting things they’ve wanted to for a long time, like music lessons and catching up on reading lists.

As folks spend more time at home, this is a good opportunity to level up your skills. Invest some time now to make yourself a better growth expert by learning SQL and Python. (You’ll thank me later.)

Why? As marketers grow more dependent on their BI team, it’s useful to develop the knowledge to understand marketing analytics more deeply. By learning SQL basics, marketers will be able to query their own data, come up with their own conclusions, and become more independent. With Python, you can be self-sufficient in automation and more innovative with your work.

The role of data scientist has become a game-changer in the advertising space. At a minimum, learning how to pipe data into reporting will empower you and your BI team to speak more of the same language.

We’re in this together

A Singular team member recently asked me if I’d had any moments of pause during our shelter-in-place due to COVID-19. I’ve had so many. As we’ve shifted to working from home (I feel for you, fellow parents), buckled down to focus on how we can be even more effective, and understood the pressures that many businesses face, one thing has stood out for me…

We’re living history right now. These times will be in history books.

How we respond to the challenges we face says who we are as a global community. It also demands that business leaders summon our best selves to give back and lift up.

There can be a tendency to get lured into a constant stream of news headlines and CDC data. At the end of the day, you realize that the most effective thing you can do is just stay home and weather the storm, and to connect with friends and family in ways that are meaningful and make sense given current events.

As I see people come together—for each other, healthcare workers, neighbors, and businesses—I know we’ll get through these challenges. We’ll conquer a pandemic and bring our best selves to whatever lies ahead.

Singular is doing our small part to help.

Going Back to Work in a Startup Company After Baby No. 2

Who says working mothers in tech can’t find the perfect work-life balance?

Unfortunately, that was the word on the street—or more accurately, among my friends at tech companies—when I mentioned I wanted to return to work at 20% time after having my second child, Talya.

The First Maternity Leave

A bit of background: In one of the first posts on my personal blog, I discussed returning to work after maternity leave for Gaya, my eldest.

You’d think I wouldn’t worry about a second maternity leave. However, with Gaya, I was working in a global, relatively slow-moving corporation. By the time I had Talya, I was at Singular, an innovative startup in hyper-growth. Being away for half a year is an eternity in Singular terms. I knew what I was leaving but had no idea what would happen when I came back.

On top of that, most of my current colleagues aren’t parents. Very few are mothers of small children. Although this is gradually changing at the company, I often feel the difference—I have non-standard working hours and late meetings, and engage less in office small talk.

Enter Baby No. 2

Over the two years I’d been at Singular, we always found a way to make things work for me and the company. We were flexible and creative and just made it happen.

And yet—when I shared the news about my pregnancy, I was still insecure. All my concerns came back: What would the reaction be? Would it affect my advancement? How would we ramp my work back up when I returned?

But hey…

There was actually nothing to stress about. Everything had worked out so far, and I was sure it would again. I already knew the culture. There was simply no reason giving birth again would have a work impact. Still, I couldn’t shake my anxieties around it. (I also wrote about it on my blog.)

Striking a Post-Maternity Balance

When I was on maternity leave with Gaya, I didn’t really disconnect. I kept track of major developments in the office and with clients. This made it much easier to return to full-time work.

This time, I thought it’d be great to come back to work gradually, instead of being so plugged-in while trying to care for a newborn.

Instead of going from zero to 200%, it seemed wiser to ramp back up slowly—starting part-time, a few hours a day, a few days a week.

As I explained to the company, this way I’d be there for Talya in her first months while keeping up with company business.

To my pleasant surprise, Singular said yes.

I still had some concerns and reasons to hesitate. But, I was optimistic and hoped we could really make it work.

Ready, Set…Work

The thing is, I wasn’t ready to go back to work at all. Things at home were too hectic, and my every thought centered on my children and my family.

Despite all of this, Singular management was extremely supportive. They understood the changes my family was going through, and didn’t pressure me to come back.

After four or five months, things suddenly shifted for me. I thought about work—I figured I could start in a 20%-time position, and after a set period of time, I’d go back to full-time.

I suggested to the company that during the part-time period, I’d do anything to help the team, such as admin or back office.

I set low expectations, knowing no one had done this before—only two female employees had come back in a full-time capacity after three months. I hoped for the best.

Thankfully, my initial, little idea became a big breakthrough for me and my family. The company not only accepted my terms—my managers thought out of the box and created a special project tailored to me, where I could use my skills, increase my value, and help my team (way to go!).

As I started working part-time, I realized how much our product had changed, and I was delighted to have an easy restart. Talya was getting used to her new nanny. (Plus a special thanks to my mother, who took care of Talya while I was away and helped me out a lot.)

On Singular’s side, it meant I came back earlier than planned.

Most importantly, it signaled to all other female employees that Singular welcomes mothers and supports a flexible framework for coming back from maternity leave.

This was a pure win-win.

An Added Bonus

Now, about breastfeeding and pumping—breastfeeding is super important to me. But I hate pumping so much! I can’t stand the noise, the mess, and sitting there waiting for the bottle to fill.

When I went back to work after having Gaya, I refused to pump. The second time around, it’s been different because we have a nursing room. It’s a nice, cozy, private little space, with a small refrigerator and a sofa, that gives me all the privacy and intimacy I need for pumping. Pumping at work isn’t so bad anymore.

A Modern and Sympathetic Workplace

This is the organizational culture I always go on about. I’ve written about the major role that corporate culture plays for me. As a mother of two small children, the unfortunate truth is that wanting to work is not enough. I have to belong to a company that understands me and accepts me as a mother. A company with a flexible mindset that allows me to maneuver according to my needs. I’m thrilled Singular is here for me and grows just like its loyal employees do. No wonder our turnover rate is one of the lowest in the industry.

And I grew, too. I now know when stresses are mostly mine and when they’re unwarranted, even if I still don’t understand the source of the stress itself—why was I so afraid? Is it all just me? Am I hypercritical of myself because I think of pregnancy and birth as obstacles to a career? Or is it because I feel my needs as a mother are special in the office and require unique adjustments?

No matter what stories and speculations I hear, I can trust myself more now. I know that I started by carefully choosing a company with a great culture, and that there’s no reason why things would be different with a family-changing event like birth. Singular chose me very carefully for the skills, knowledge, and experience I contribute, and provided me with the flexibility I needed to maintain a strong work/motherhood balance. That’s a great way of solidifying an already solid commitment to one’s work, team, and company.

Singular achieves AWS Retail Competency status

We’re excited to announce we’ve achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Retail Competency status. So what exactly does that mean? As an AWS Retail Competency Partner, we’ve demonstrated technical expertise and proven success with our retail customers including StitchFix, Wish, Warby Parker, Minted, Souq, Atom Tickets, Snapdeal, Tophatter, plus several other Fortune 500 brands (we can’t list publicly).

Singular is built to provide a single source of truth for marketing performance – a challenge marketers & BI teams everywhere desperately need to solve for with today’s complex ecosystem. We simplify marketing data by automatically combining your most important datasets including marketing campaign data, user-behavior/attribution data and BI data for accurate insights needed to grow at scale. As experts in AWS technologies and as a certified Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), we consult our customers on how to build advanced marketing tech stacks. We’ve become the de facto solution to power the internal BI of the top growth marketing teams in the world.

Check out some recent resources on how we’re helping retail brands:

• [Blog] Experts from Airbnb, Stitch Fix, and Bark Box on multi-touch attribution & incrementality

• [Guide] Ecommerce Playbook: Growth Loops and Scaling Profitable Growth

“We’re excited to have achieved the AWS Retail Competency,” Eran Friedman, our CTO & Co-founder reflects. “Our team has been dedicated to helping growth teams of top global brands scale their businesses by better leveraging their marketing data, which is especially important for retail companies where customer engagement is a critical component of their overall strategy. And with the agility, breadth of services and pace of innovation that AWS provides, we’ve been able to make marketing data more accessible than ever to BI teams.”

AWS enables scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

Our retail customers see huge returns after investing in Singular to streamline their growth marketing data. South Korea’s largest retail app, Home & Shopping, saw a 73% increase in ROI after Singular automatically collected and unified campaign data from 30+ sources with our native attribution to understand and optimize marketing performance.

Home & Shopping Success with Singular — With Singular, Home & Shopping sees 73% increase in ROI

Interested in how you can achieve the same results? Sign up for a free trial of Singular now.

What Singular is doing with the Mobile Attribution Privacy working group

Wondering what Apple’s new privacy enhancements mean for you?
Watch our on-demand webinar iOS 14 & IDFA Changes: What you need to know

Will we soon be living in a post-IDFA world? It’s hard to say, but there are some reasons to prepare for it, which is why Singular has established the Mobile Attribution Privacy working group.

In 2019 so far there have been over 1,000 privacy breaches exposing over 146 million records. That’s just one reason why privacy and data security are becoming increasingly important, both from a regulatory standpoint and a customer trust point of view.

As I shared with you a few months ago, Singular has already started making steps towards a more privacy-safe attribution model.

Recently, we met with representatives from companies including Lyft, AirBnB, Twitter, WB Games, Jam City, DraftKings, Oracle, Branch, Unity, the Mobile Marketing Association, LUMA Partners, and many others as part of a Mobile Attribution Privacy (MAP) working group. Our goal as advertisers and vendors: talk about options for measuring marketing while serving the privacy needs and desires of customers and users … even if the IDFA goes away.

Post-IDFA: what we talked about

In our first meeting, we talked about whether this was mobile and web, or mostly just mobile. The consensus: we’re going to keep this primarily focused on mobile attribution.

We also talked about Google advertising ID, and whether that should be part of the conversation. Though it seems that Google would be much less likely to abandon their primary identifier than Apple, we decided that we should look at global solutions for both Android and iOS.

One of the things we unanimously agreed on: we need to be focused on the needs of people: users and customers. If something doesn’t matter to users, it shouldn’t matter to us, and conversely, if it does, then it needs to be a core concern for marketers and marketing technology vendors.

This is one of those things that sounds simple but is actually complex.

For example, Apple cares first and foremost about their users, but to get these users to the iOS platform they need content providers to thrive and have an economic incentive to build for it. As one participant said: “People choose a phone based on where they can play Fortnite.”

And while big content creators could survive removal of device identifiers (by switching to something else – like an email address), many smaller ecosystem players would struggle to survive, as this will greatly deteriorate people’s ability to know who their users are and where they came from.

Broadening the conversation

Two interesting ideas that have legs came up. And they’re both ways to broaden the conversation.

One is to bring this discussion to the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and perhaps create a working group focused on Mobile Identifiers. The IAB, after all, is dealing with other privacy-related topics. Another is to view this area as an extension to the GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) legislation. Both are valid suggestions, and we’ll be looking into both options.

And finally, we spoke about multiple device identifier options:

Auto-rotating (short-lived) IDFAs
If the IDFA auto-rotated, say weekly or monthly, Apple would limit how long you can track any particular user. This should permit proper advertising attribution. One question yet to answer: can an app developer stitch the rotating IDFAs together as long as the user is active within their app? Some would consider that app activity as a “meaningful relationship” which may permit doing so; others might consider it a violation of privacy.
Google Play Referrer equivalent
Google has an excellent mechanism for passing referrer context into Google Play that the app can then query upon installation. Again, this would enable attribution. The obvious problem here is that enabling this type of link tracking makes it impossible to prevent vendors from appending a device ID, click ID, or other form of identification that could be connected to a specific person.
SKAdNetwork
This is somewhat of a similar concept: you pass info to the App Store, but it’s not exposed to the installed app. The data is controlled by the operating system, and the amount of data you can pass along is greatly limited. In its current form this feels immature, but that could change with serious interest from major players.

And the conversation continues

Ultimately, we’re going to continue the conversation. We’re also going to broaden it to new players, and we invite anyone who is an interested party to be part of the next meeting of the Mobile Attribution Privacy group, either in person or via videoconferencing.

If you’d like to be part of the Mobile Attribution Privacy (MAP) Coalition, please join us in the MAP Slack group. There, you’ll be able to connect with other industry folks who are working to move the digital marketing community forward in this new, more privacy-safe world.

Introducing Singular’s Certified Partner Program

Singular is the pioneer in unifying campaign data and attribution data from thousands of media sources to provide a single source of truth for granular ROI analysis. As such, our partners sit at the core of our technology, providing data excellence that drives the intelligent insights in order for marketers to scale performance.

To hold our partners accountable at the highest level of data integrity, we are excited to announce the launch of the Singular Certified Partner Program!

The Certified Partner Program (CPP) is our commitment to the industry to set the standard for data integrity within our partner ecosystem. Therefore, we raised the bar high with strict requirements to be considered for the program. We categorized these requirements into three main areas of focus:

Data excellence
The partner is passing both aggregated campaign data and user-level attribution data
Data governance
The partner is passing all campaign analytics data via an API, has complied with GDPR, and has committed to combating mobile app fraud.
Service commitment
The partner has a minimum designated list of mutual customers, is receiving training across relevant business teams on the Singular platform, and has committed to ongoing market development and account mapping efforts.

After an extensive audit across our integrated partners, we identified 12 launch partners that met all requirements and showcased the highest value to our advertisers. We are pleased to announce the following partners as part of the Certified Partner Program launch!

Jeremy Bondy, VP Revenue, Vungle
“Vungle is excited to be an inaugural member of Singular’s Certified Partner Program, which will create the gold standard of data integrity for the mobile app industry. As the trusted guide for mobile growth and engagement, Vungle looks forward to championing these new practices through Singular’s CPP and improving ROI for advertisers”

Sarah Chafer, SVP, Global Performance Sales, Tapjoy
“We are extremely proud to be a trusted participant in the Singular Certified Partner Program. As a leader in the mobile app industry for over 10 years, our mission is to provide the transparent & qualified campaign data that all marketers deserve.”

Troy Nicolaou, Director of Performance, AdColony
“We are proud to be a part of the Singular Certified Partner Program and to continue our collaborative investment in bringing the highest value to the best and brightest marketers around the world.”

Over the course of the year, we will be working closely with all our integrated partners to build everyone to the same level of excellence as our launch partners. Together we are the trusted source for marketing intelligence and look forward to further setting industry standards.

For more information on how to become a Singular Certified Partner, reach out to partners@singular.net.

CEO insights: Why creative fatigue isn’t as simple as it sounds

CEO Insights is a new column by Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv focusing on some of the most challenging issues in scientific marketing.

Most sophisticated growth organizations we’re working with are placing an enormous importance on creatives. These companies usually have in-house design teams dedicated for making creatives, plus processes and metrics around the production and launch process.

All of it is designed to ensure optimized results.

These companies understand the power of creative optimization and distribute shared responsibility for amazing creative throughout the organization. Designers have been educated about performance metrics, and they’re savvy enough to combine their art with science in the form of cold, hard metrics.

These top brands also have periodic meetings (bi-weekly or more) where the design team sits down with the marketing team. Together they carefully examine the performance of various assets, and find a balance between introducing new winning concepts, sustaining proven concepts, and eliminating bad ones.

More advanced marketers also apply particular conventions to how assets are managed and tagged, so that tens of thousands of creative variations can be grouped by a handful of key concepts, which helps identify key trends.

All of these workflows and analysis capabilities are available out of the box for our customers through Singular’s creative optimization suite, and it gives our customers an enormous edge.

So: what is the right process?

One area that was of interest to me was the pace at which companies swap out creative assets.

When asking various companies, I got a range of answers from: “we don’t have bandwidth for that at all” to “we have a constant refresh rate.” Some companies update on a fixed period of time (every two weeks or a month), while others update their creative “whenever design creates a new one.”

Obviously, not all creative costs the same to produce, and some creative is super expensive to produce in time and money like playables and videos. Other assets, however, can be produced quickly and efficiently, and when infused with time-specific context (such as a big concert, or a particular live event in a game) they can produce great results.

A common theme I’ve heard is the following way to run analysis on your creatives:

Cadence
- Weekly or bi-weekly
Data input
- Creative asset performance from all channels (Singular does that out of the box: check out our API)
- Campaign targeting option data, particularly around the major self-attributing networks, to identify targeting methodology (value optimization, bid optimization, etc. …)
- Channel, country, region, plus any other breakdowns that makes sense to you
- Four weeks of data
  - Period A: first 2 weeks of data
  - Period B: second 2 weeks of data
Two simple data outputs
- Check the trend of currently running creatives to detect big drops that might suggest these creatives should be cycled.
  - The drops could be in clicks, installs, eCPM, or any other metrics that make sense
  - For customers using Singular’s attribution, we enable ROI granularity all the way down to the creative level, so you can check for a drop in your main KPI (which is often what the ad engines optimize against)
- Isolate the creatives that did not exist in Period A, but existed in Period B, and identify how they are trending. Learn from new concepts that are succeeding well, and some that are failing to ramp up.

One example:

Creative	Period A			Period B
	CTR	Conversions	eCPM	CTR	Conversions	eCPM
Creative 1	3%	7,500	$9.50	1.5%	3,300	$11.75
Creative 2	n/a	n/a	n/a	3.5%	15,000	$11
Creative 3	n/a	n/a	n/a	1.5%	3,400	$9
Creative 4	1%	2,200	$3.40	2.3%	4,300	$4.23

Creative fatigue and time

As I look at all this data, the questions I keep asking myself are:

When is the right time to swap creatives?
Do companies know those times?
Can they even figure them out?

The answers to those questions, as I found out, are very complex. After dozens of talks with top tier marketers I got literally dozens of answers, and none of them was the silver bullet I was hoping for.

(Mostly likely, there isn’t any one single silver bullet. The techniques that work for one app are different than those that work for another brand.)

The one common thread in all these conversations was the favorite topic of creative fatigue detection. The formal definition of creative fatigue is that consumers/users/customers do not even see your ad anymore. They’ve become so used to it, that it is now just part of the default background for them.

Traditionally, the first thing people think about fatigue is that CTRs drop over time, because people have seen your ad again and again, and those who wanted to click have done that already.

But when I started researching some data, that naive assumption quickly surfaced as being incorrect.

When dealing with optimizing algorithms like Facebook’s and others, they will track the number of exposures each user had seen (frequency) and will cap that at a certain point, because their algorithm understands that it’ll be a waste of an impression, and also lead to a bad user experience.

So FB simply chooses another ad to show.

You can quickly see this phenomenon in the chart below.

In the first chart, CTR does not drop appreciably throughout the campaign. A campaign manager who looks only at this probably thinks that all is well with her ads.

But there is actually a significant problem.

What’s actually happening behind the scenes is that Facebook knows that it has exhausted your chosen audience, and the number of people it is showing the ad to has dropped precipitously:

It’s important to say ads will not always behave that way. That’s why when analyzing fatigue you need to not only know what assets you’re using, but also what ad channels you’re running on, what bidding methodology is being used, and what their algorithms do.

(For example: due to saturation, the algorithm could also start increasing the CPM bid to generate more impressions, which will decrease your ROAS).

In general, even if these algorithms are smart enough to avoid audience fatigue, it is still the responsibility of the marketer to identify it and remedy the situation. You can find new audiences, add new creatives, and so on.

But there can be more going on

Sometimes when you’re looking for creative fatigue you’ll see data that doesn’t make sense at first. For instance, you might have a click-through rate chart like this one, which shows creative gaining strength over time:

All looks well at first glance. But … if you check impressions, there’s clearly something else going on. The number of impressions is skyrocketing:

Something very different is going on here.

Hint: this behavior can be related to changes in bids and budgets … another key thing to think about when testing for creative fatigue. Changing the bid (even if it’s a CPI/CPA bid) will directly impact the amount of money you’re willing to spend on a certain impression, therefore creating more impressions that were not accessible before at your previous bid.

In short: creative fatigue is one of those concepts that seems easy to understand and easy to diagnose … but actually isn’t. To find out if creative fatigue is actually happening, you need to dig deeper into the data than most can or will.

Fortunately, that’s where Singular can help …

What’s next

That’s it for this post. In the next post, I’ll look more at how bids and budgets impact click-through rates, impressions, and conversions.

Market share and the exciting future of Singular

I was recently speaking at a mobile marketing conference in San Francisco and saw a competitor’s booth.

In the booth, the competitor showed the relative market share of the various mobile attribution providers. Predictably, theirs was highest. Other players didn’t show very well, and Singular was one of them.

I loved it. Because they don’t understand what we do.

Playing a different game

Mobile Attribution is a very critical piece in a much larger puzzle.

That’s why we acquired an MMP, re-architected it as part of a holistic solution instead of a point solution, and that’s why we are winning over a massive number of tier one customers.

In fact, Singular has more customers, bar none, in the top 100 grossing apps on Android and the top 100 grossing apps on iOS than any of our competitors. 46% of the top 100 grossing iOS apps are Singular customers (and 50% of the top 50) and 46% of the top 100 grossing Android apps are Singular customers (and 50% of the top 50).

That’s because we offer something different.

Something bigger.

Singular is a marketing intelligence platform. Our mission is to provide actionable insights to our customers, the best scientific marketers in the world.

We do that by solving the massive problem of data explosion and fragmentation in the marketing ecosystem across mobile, web, TV, offline, as well as paid, email, push, organic and any other form of marketing. We go beyond the confines of mobile advertising and mobile attribution, and are the only single pane of glass for all your marketing activity.

Every company in the world needs this.

Looking to the future

Today, we unify the biggest spectrum of more than 2,000 marketing technologies. And it’s just the beginning.

To echo Jeff Bezos, it’s day one.

For us what matters is having the best North Star. And that is the top customers. In every market, the top companies are a constant source of envy and imitation by the up-and-comers and smaller companies.

Since our launch in 2014, and up until this very moment of me typing this, these top customers are the strongest source of influence on our roadmap. That, combined with our vision, is helping us move forward.

We’ve got a lot in the kitchen. You’re going to start hearing more about it in January. Our vision is huge, and we’re well capitalized to make it happen.

For our amazing Singular customers, our sole mission is to be a great, innovative partner that will always put you two steps ahead of the competition. Accept nothing but relentless drive to serve, topped with the whipping cream of world-class innovation.

That is what the best do.

And we aim to serve the best.

Singular closes $30M funding to accelerate innovation for growth marketers

Since founding Singular in 2014, we’ve focused on solving the data challenge for marketers. And it’s only gotten tougher.

Five years ago when we came up with the idea for Singular, there were 150 marketing technology tools. Today there are almost 7,000, and the average enterprise uses more than 90 martech tools, each with their own datastream. The marketing technology landscape has exploded, and thanks to new devices, new data points, and new marketing KPIs, the amount of data being thrown at marketers is simply overwhelming.

We’re incredibly fortunate to be the first to truly solve this challenge, and are becoming the de facto leader of the marketing intelligence space.

Today I’m excited and humbled to announce we’ve raised $30M in series B funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. We’re really happy to also have the full support and participation of all our previous investors, including General Catalyst, Method Capital, Telstra Ventures, Translink Capital, and Thomvest.

This past year has been one of the most exciting years of my professional life, and I’m so proud of what our team has accomplished. Just in the past year, we’ve:

Hosted an amazing experts-only marketing event: UNIFY
Acquired a company and fully integrated its team and technology
Onboarded some of the best brands and smartest marketers in mobile to our attribution product
Measured over a trillion events for marketers
Optimized over $10B in clients’ marketing spend
Doubled our global team
Opened offices in London, India, Japan, and Korea alongside our existing home bases in Tel Aviv and San Francisco
And lastly, continued on our aggressive growth path and achieved more than 100% revenue growth

But in reality, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

We have a really big vision for how Singular can help marketers unify their data, optimize for growth, and get timely, intelligent insights to guide data-driven decision making. It’s really about the entire organization.

CEOs need to align their teams to common goals and build in accountability. CMOs have to drive profitable growth with data. CFOs have to allocate capital effectively. VPs of growth need to define and execute growth strategies. UA managers and performance marketers need to test new channels, maximize efficiency, and attribute growth results to marketing inputs. And BI analysts need clean data in standardized formats to ingest into corporate systems.

The common denominators?

Trustworthy data. Accurate measurement. Actionable intelligence. And there’s so much room for Singular to help.

We start by enabling marketing science. We know that there’s always going to be art to marketing. That’s the heart of what marketers do: the right words, the right images, the right feel.

The brain, however — the marketing science — tells marketers what resonates, what engages, and what ultimately drives action.

To drive the science of marketing, companies build their best-of-breed tech stacks, choosing from thousands of marketing solutions and/or marketing cloud providers. But no matter how you’ve built your tech stack, connecting it is not easy.

This is where Singular comes in.

Singular integrates with your tools of choice. By unifying marketing data from more than 2,000 global marketing and advertising partners, and combining upper-funnel marketing data with bottom-funnel conversion, attribution, and customer data, we provide the much needed standardization and insights marketers need. The result is marketing science.

That includes processing data in any format, and partnering at the deepest levels with Facebook, Google, Apple, and all of the other key marketing partners, as an MMP. We’ve worked hard to ensure our customers can finally achieve marketing’s holy grail: all data, standardized, accessible, and actionable, at their fingertips.

We’ve had a great start.

We’re honored to work with some of the smartest brands in the world. I truly cannot say how much I appreciate our customers. They’ve taught us so much about what marketers need, and about how marketing is evolving as a discipline.

I thank you for being part of our journey, and I’m giving you fair warning: expect significantly more innovation and excellence in the coming months and quarters. We’re going to use this funding round to give you tools that enable your greatness, and we have some amazing plans to make that happen. Please continue to be in touch with us. Your insights and your feedback guide our roadmaps.

I also have to express appreciation for our investors. They fuel our fires, and they are not just sources of capital. They truly get it. We’re so impressed with our investors. They’ve learned everything there is to know about our business, and they’ve surprised us with how smart their insights are. Thank you for partnering with us.

Last but not least: the Singular team has earned this.

You’ve worked late, worked weekends, worked holidays, (and worst of all, worked for me!) … all in pursuit of a dream and a goal. We’ve accomplished many things, and now we’re getting major reinforcements. Thank you for being part of the journey. We really are a Singular family, and I am so thankful for each and every one of you.

I couldn’t be more proud of the team, and we couldn’t be more excited for what the future holds. Thank you for your support throughout the years.

Now, we’re turning our eyes to the future. We have some amazing new projects we’re working on that we can’t wait to unveil, and I’ll make sure to be in touch when we’re ready to talk about it.

If you’re not currently a Singular customer, click here to find out what you’re missing. If you are, thank you!

And… expect great things.